Mr. St. John

by Loren D. Estleman

  He picked up his cigar and blew smoke rings. “Settle their hash, Mr. St. John. That’s a British expression.”

  In the hall outside the office, St. John paused to knock out his pipe on the edge of a smoking stand next to the door. A typist Rawlings didn’t know glanced at them curiously as she hurried past clutching a manila folder, her skirt gliding along the rubber runner as if she had wheels under her petticoats.

  “You ever ride posse before, Mr. Rawlings?” asked St. John, when a door had closed behind her at the end of the hall.

  “This is my first one.”

  “Then here’s your first lesson. Don’t ever make excuses for the man in charge. If he’s any good, he won’t need them, and if he’s not, he doesn’t deserve them.”

  “If you mean what I said about the killing,” retorted the detective, “what was I supposed to do, let you take the blame for Pierce’s mistake?”

  “I don’t remember appointing you my keeper. And it wasn’t his mistake.”

  “Whose, then?”

  “Mine. I sent the wrong one out to help George with that automobile. I should of sent Testament and left you to guard Wood. You wouldn’t of been so quick to shoot. But I didn’t count on him taking Testament by surprise like he did.”

  “I warned you about Pierce at the beginning.”

  “I don’t like him neither, but he’s a good man in his place. You just haven’t seen it yet. You will when the time comes. I hope it doesn’t.” He opened his pocketknife and scraped the bowl of the pipe. “Just remember who’s giving the orders, and who’s responsible for what happens. I know I’m an old man, but I don’t require nursing just yet.”

  They were moving down the hall now, St. John cleaning the pipe as he walked. Rawlings nodded to the attractive redhead at the front desk, who had accepted his undeveloped pictures for processing and shipment to Washington. She smiled back. They had gone out to dinner once, but he couldn’t remember her name.

  Outside, the air was cooling and there was a collar of gray cloud to the west, solemnly promising rain or snow before nightfall. The street rumbled and creaked with wagon traffic hauling bricks and timber; Cheyenne was undergoing another of its periodic building booms amid the atmosphere of national prosperity. Khaki-clad soldiers bivouacking in the area loitered singly in doorways and wandered the boardwalks in pairs and groups, their dimpled campaign hats prevented from sliding forward over their freckle faces by thin black straps hugging the curve of their close-cropped heads. To Rawlings they seemed terribly young to be carrying the burden of a nation’s security. He wondered if such an observation was the first sign of age.

  “Now that we got our own personal train, there’s time before we leave if you want to go home and see your wife or something,” St. John said. He exchanged his pipe for a fresh cigar and turned into a shop doorway to light it. A gray-haired woman standing behind a counter inside glared at him. He winked at her.

  “I don’t have a wife.”

  The match went into the gutter and they resumed walking in the direction of the train station. “I reckon it’s none of my business to ask how come.”

  “You’re right,” said the detective shoddily. “None of your business is exactly what it is.”

  Then he was telling the old lawman about the girl in Charleston who had promised to wait and who, when he came back from the war with Spain, had been six months married and gone. His association with the agency had begun soon afterward, and he had yet to find a woman who was willing to share him with the ghost of Allan Pinkerton.

  “Odds are you haven’t tried.” St. John gave the cigar a quarter turn at intervals to keep it from burning unevenly in the slight breeze.

  “Not really. I enjoy detective work. If I spend the rest of my life married to the agency, I won’t think it was wasted.”

  “Time’s a funny thing,” said his companion. “You never know you’re wasting it till it’s gone.”

  They were nearing the station. A sharp odor of steam and steel reached them on a blast of arctic air as they turned a corner. Rawlings turned up his coat collar. “Did you mean what you said in there about me talking too much?” he asked.

  “There you go again.”

  The special train consisted of a locomotive, tender and caboose, a day coach, a boxcar for the horses, and a Pullman salon car equipped like a brothel on wheels, with everything but the girls. That thought set Pierce to prowling the platform while the engineer and conductor stood outside the cab glumly waiting for the through local to pull out before leaving the siding. White steam exhaled by the champing engine moistened Testament’s trouser legs as he paused to survey the knot of well-wishers gathered near the other train. His eyes lingered for a moment on a pretty adolescent girl in yellow dress and bonnet, then moved on. She was standing with an adult couple, probably her parents. There were a few other girls of various ages and appearances, all in the company of older people. But except for them, no females below the age of twenty appeared within reasonable distance. He sighed and boarded the coach.

  The air inside was close and he could smell the Mexicans the length of the aisle. They sat together as always, the big one snoring with his slouch hat tilted down to his large and obvious nostrils, the thin one with the scars glancing up at Pierce, then quickly dropping his bright black eyes as if lied been expecting another photographer to take his picture aboard a train. Pierce suspected that the bandit had never ridden the rails before Kansas City and that he thought a birdlike man in black tails carrying lightning on a rod was part of the service. About what you could expect from a country overpopulated with Catholics and heathens.

  Rawlings and Edwards were outside on the platform, and there was no sign of the Indian. He was most likely in conference with St. John in the private car. The Sunday school teacher remembered that they had always kept close company and wondered if some savage blood ran in the old lawman’s veins. He sat down in the first seat, as far from the Mexicans as the dimensions of the coach allowed, and put his face near the open window to clear his nose of the stench of chili peppers and bean wind and stale sweat.

  The whistle sounded. Edwards came in and took a seat behind Testament, followed a moment later by the Pinkerton. The conductor bawled. The engine rocked back with a sigh, then started forward. The car jolted into motion. The platform began to slide. Pierce drew out his Bible.

  This time he didn’t read it. He was opening it to his black ribbon marker when he spotted ex-Sheriff Fred Dieterle standing outside. Their gazes locked for a moment before the corner of the depot roof moved between them.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Twelve to Denver

  Oddly, the first emotion that swept over Fred Dieterle when he saw Midian Pierce’s face framed in the moving window was not hatred or triumph or even surprise, but wonder.

  He had lost St. John’s trail in Elephant Crossing. Entering the tar-paper-and-canvas saloon while his train took on water, he had smelled the foul residue of smoke and urine, read the black-bearded bartender’s face, and divined immediately that the group had passed through within forty-eight hours. But neither the bartender nor his customers would respond to general questioning, and his lawman’s instincts had warned him against displaying too much interest in the affairs of others among those surroundings. His stiff leg made him tempting prey for the two-legged wolves that dwelled in such places.

  The impression he got was that the band had not returned to the train, but had unloaded their horses and struck out across country heading north. He had considered, then decided against hiring a mount to follow. Though he doubted his handicap would interfere with riding, the melting snow would have obliterated most of their signs and he wasn’t a good enough tracker to pursue them without its aid. Instead he had climbed back aboard his train and gone on Denver, then bought a ticket on the express north to Cheyenne. Capital cities operated on rumor and innuendo; perhaps a few questions whispered in the right ears would reveal what St. John was up to and thus render his movements
more predictable.

  After three days he had learned that Judge Parker’s old deputy had been engaged by the Pinkertons to bring the Race Buckner gang to justice, that President Roosevelt had hired him to investigate rumors of a revolution brewing below the Mexican border, that he was preparing to go to South America in search of Butch Cassidy, that he had been asked by the State Department to escort the Kaiser on a hunt for big game in the Badlands, and that he was assembling a private army to take Missouri by force in revenge for his humiliating election loss on November 6. Dieterle discounted only the stories about the private army and the Kaiser. As for Mexico and South America, they seemed unlikely in view of the route St. John had chosen. The Buckner theory was of no use at all even if it was true. Which left him back where he had started.

  He had taken to haunting the station whenever a train came in from the East, picking out likely-looking passengers and striking up casual conversations while their luggage was being unloaded. If the old lawman lived up to his reputation—and the condition of the saloon in Elephant Crossing indicated that he did—excitement followed him, and news of his actions would be picked up and scattered by the four winds like cottonseeds. But nothing came of that. He was just leaving the depot after one of these excursions when he happened to look up as the express that had been parked on the siding pulled past and his eyes met Pierce’s.

  His heart actually hesitated a beat. A deputy for three years before making his bid for sheriff, Dieterle had learned not to trust in coincidence, to suspect evil intent over capricious fate. But when the latter stepped up and bit him on the nose he could only stand in awe. The caboose had passed him doing twenty by the time he thought to move, and by then his quarry was once again beyond his grasp.

  He hurried to the ticket window, behind which a young man in sleeve garters was stacking and putting away timetables.

  “That train that just left. Who’s on it and where’s it headed?”

  He had to repeat the question in his hoarse whisper before the clerk understood him. “That train? That’s Ike St. John’s special. He’s cleared through to Denver. Talk is he’s on a diplomatic mission to Japan for Henry Cabot Lodge.”

  “When’s the next train to Denver?”

  “Not till tomorrow night. You want a ticket?”

  But Dieterle was already gone, his cane propelling him with thumps and creaks toward the livery where his horse was boarded. The clerk shrugged and went back to his busywork.

  The sky, so clear that morning, had been metallic since noon, the dark snow clouds spreading like smelted lead from the mountains in the west to where plain met sky at the Kansas border. The first flakes started very high up, tumbling and spinning for what seemed hours before they floated like pale cinders to the naked dead grass still bent over from the last snow. The air was damp cold and smelled of raw iron.

  Merle Buckner flicked a drop from his red nose and sawed disconsolately at his horse’s reins, drawing an irritated whinny from the animal that filled him with satisfaction. Unlike his cousin, he had grown up in the city and had never sat a horse until he was nineteen. He had been thrown that time, and though he had climbed right back into the saddle, he hadn’t trusted the beasts since and had avoided becoming an accomplished rider out of pure spite. To him a horse was just something a man had to put up with to get from one place to another faster than he could on foot, and for this reason he had followed closely the development of the motorcar. He hoped to own one when the present project was finished. Then he would buy the finest horse he could find, tether it to the rear bumper, and force it to run along behind until it dropped, and then drag — what life remained out-of-it. What Merle couldn’t master, he longed to destroy.

  Race, riding a little ahead of him and to his left, was strangely silent for an inveterate talker. Merle scraped a rowel along his mount’s ribs and spurted forward, yanking back on the reins as he drew abreast. The horse squealed.

  “Where we meeting Carroll?” Merle asked.

  “Sheltered wash northeast of Denver. Says he hid out there in ‘96 after they got Bill Doolin in Oklahoma.” Race sounded bored.

  “Christ, I hope it’s there. You know him and his stones.”

  “It’s there. He might stretch the blanket some, but he wouldn’t leave us twisting.”

  “He bringing this guy Bitsko?”

  “If he goes for the deal.”

  They didn’t say anything for a while. Behind them Jim Shirley and the Cherokee woman rode without speaking. Leather creaked. “You’re generally hard to shut up before a job,” Merle said then. “You act like you got your rope on something you don’t know what to do with.”

  “I couldn’t explain it so you’d understand.”

  “That’s just a nice way of saying you’re smarter than me, and I don’t like it.”

  More silence. Then: “I don’t get no picture of us walking out of this thing still wearing our heads. We never done nothing like it before and it don’t feel like us, none of it. It makes you think.”

  “It makes me think you’re just jumpy on account of it’s so big. You’ll get over it.”

  “I’m thinking this is one we ought to pass on,” Race said.

  They had been speaking low. Now Merle’s voice dropped to a savage whisper. “You heard the vote. You want out or what?”

  “Not unless everyone else wants out with me.”

  “Seems to me I remember summers at your place when we was kids, and you being the only one with guts enough to climb that big elm next to the crick and dive in from the top. You changed some.”

  Race laughed dryly. “I still got the scar on my head from the last time when I hit that rock.” He stopped laughing. “You know how long it’s been since they shot Jesse James?”

  “How the hell should I know?” said Merle, after a moment. “Near twenty years, I reckon.”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “So?”

  “Hell, Merle, it was another century and he still got shot. You read a paper lately? Moving pictures, telephones, electric lights, automobiles—flying machines, for chrissake. Can you tell me what we’re doing playing Jesse James when they got flying machines?”

  “I’m with you now,” the other said. “You passed me there for a minute but I’m caught up now.”

  “Figured you would be.”

  “You reckon we got enough to buy us one of them flying machines before we hit the ore train?”

  Race looked at his cousin’s eager face. The snow was falling faster now, in poker-chip–size flakes that sizzled when they touched ground. The younger Buckner grunted and kneed his horse forward, leaving Merle behind in a puzzled condition.

  St. John sighed and stretched his limbs as far as the fancy enameled tub would let him. The hot water penetrated to his aching joints, forcing the gray cold pain into temporary retreat. The slight swaying of the Pullman barely stirred the steaming surface.

  “Sure you won’t join me?” he asked the Indian. “There’s a spare tub in the caboose, porter says.”

  “I only bathe when I’m dirty.” George American Horse, poisoning the air with one of his six-for-a-quarter cheroots, watched him from the depths of a wingback chair, upholstered in burgundy velvet to go with the carpet and curtains. In his rough trail clothes, the Crow looked as out of place amid the gleaming brass and polished wood trim of the ear as a breechclout at a cotillion.

  The old lawman naked was nothing new to George, who had scrubbed with him and others in creeks and brackish ponds from Fort Smith to the Texas border. The flesh was softer, not as dark, and he had grown thick in the waist, but his body remained in good condition, especially for a man his age. The eighteen-inch scar running down his right arm from shoulder to wrist, a souvenir of his first meeting with Cold Steel Stu Charming in a Guthrie whorehouse, was fading, and the Indian was glad to see that the bullet hole he had cauterized and patched by firelight in the Winding Stair country had healed into a pale second navel low on St. John’s abdomen. No one
in that long-ago posse had given a Confederate dollar for his chances of living to see civilization.

  “You still carrying that bullet?” George asked then.

  St. John lay with the water up to his chin and the back of his head resting on the lip of the tub; his eyes closed. He opened them. “Which one? The one in my foot or the one in my back?” His dreamy tone revealed that he was on the verge of sleep.

  “The one in your back. The one that German rustler put through your gut from up on that ledge. I was there when Judd Lowe dug the one out of your foot.” It had split St. John’s second toe on the right foot. Long since mended, it looked like two toes.

  “Some of it’s still there, snugged up next to the spine. It shattered when it hit the hip bone and sprayed pieces all over. Doc in Fort Smith got most of them but he didn’t want to touch the piece in my back.”

  “I remember him saying it was the cold weather saved you. Ten degrees warmer and you’d have bled white halfway there.”

  “And if that bullet had been rimfire instead of center-fire it would of flattened out against my hip bone and you’d of plucked her out with tweezers that same day and I wouldn’t be feeling it every time it rains. How things might have gone and how they went don’t have much to do with each other.”

  A black porter in a white uniform coat came in after knocking and emptied a steaming bucket into the tub. St. John blew through pursed lips. His knuckles whitened on the edge of the tub. Grinning, the porter bowed and left with his vacant pail.

  “Why Denver?” The Indian snuffed out the cheroot between thumb and forefinger and put it away in his shirt pocket. “That wire Wood sent could be nothing.”

  “I’m counting on its being something.” Slowly St. John relaxed in the scalding water. His face was red.

  “You could have split up the posse, sent someone to check out Denver, and kept on trailing the Buckners. This way it’s a gamble.”